


Sing Ye Praises With Understanding

by emjee (MerryHeart)



Category: Black Sails
Genre: London years, M/M, Post-Canon, Religious Discussion, implied FlintHamiltons, religious queer people, unbeta'd we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:21:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26351833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MerryHeart/pseuds/emjee
Summary: “Not concerned God will make you account for that on Judgement Day?”“He is welcome to ask; I have a ready answer.”James looks up at him, amazed in the way that Thomas often amazes him, which is to say he is both full of wonder and utterly bewildered. Before he can think, the words, “How can you—” have left his mouth.Thomas raises an eyebrow, waits.James and Thomas discuss the nature of Divine Love in between rounds of Sunday afternoon sex.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton
Comments: 32
Kudos: 91





	Sing Ye Praises With Understanding

**Author's Note:**

> me? projecting onto religious queer characters? it's exactly as likely as you'd think.

_1705_

James wakes to the sound of rain against the window. The light in the room is gray, hazy, as if it’s only half made up its mind to be there at all. It could be any time of day excepting the middle of the night, and for a moment James considers if he’d rather not know, and instead go back to sleep with his face buried in a pillow that smells like whatever herbs get tucked between the Hamilton’s linens when they’re stored.

It’s the humming that drags him fully back to the surface. James opens his eyes and shifts as quietly as he can, hoping to catch Thomas in a rare moment when he doesn’t know he’s being observed. He is sitting by the window in his shirt and dressing gown, book open in his lap but apparently forgotten, fingers drumming on the windowsill as he stares at the glass. There can’t be much to see, the weather being what it is.

Thomas’ humming turns to proper singing, albeit under his breath. “ _…We joy in God, who is the spring of mirth…_ ”

Ah. That’s it. Sunday afternoon.

James sits up, the rustle of the sheets turning Thomas’s attention to him. “You let me fall asleep?”

“You looked like you needed it.”

“After such a thorough usage, I expect I did. Though if memory serves—I presume I haven’t been out that long—so did you.”

Thomas shrugs. He isn’t getting much sleep lately—neither of them are, what with their current efforts to harangue lawmakers into acquiescence with a plan most think is madness. Thomas seems to be dealing with it by pushing through aided by strong tea and force of will, whereas James has fallen asleep in the middle of the afternoon after a frankly magnificent fuck, which would feel rude if he didn’t practically live here now.

“In all seriousness,” he says, “what time is it?”

“Half past four. You only slept half an hour or so.”

James scrubs a hand through his hair. “Plenty of time until tea, then. Do we have work to do?”

Thomas shuts the book and leaves it on the windowsill, then crawls back into bed beside James. “We can leave it for a few hours. Lord’s Day and all.”

James suppresses the urge to snort. Neither he nor Thomas, with all their ambition, have historically paid much mind to the injunction against work on Sundays. Miranda’s begun to raise the point recently, less out of piety, he thinks, than out of worry.

He rests his head against Thomas’s shoulder and resists the urge to doze off again. “How was service this morning?”

“Didn’t think much of the sermon, but we had a good hymn.”

“Did you point out the preacher’s rhetorical flaws in the churchyard after?”

“As it happens I was rather impatient to get home to you.”

Thomas sometimes says things that make James physically lose his balance. In this moment he’s exceptionally glad he’s already sitting, and even then he can feel the room tilt.

“Not concerned God will make you account for that on Judgement Day?”

“He is welcome to ask; I have a ready answer.”

James looks up at him, amazed in the way that Thomas often amazes him, which is to say he is both full of wonder and utterly bewildered. Before he can think, the words, “How can you—” have left his mouth.

Thomas raises an eyebrow, waits.

James can be found in the nave of his parish church every Sunday morning more because that is what is expected of the man he wants to become in society than because he personally would choose to be there. He makes Communion on Sundays when it is offered, sings the appointed music, gives the responses in a measured tone of voice no one could fault. He appreciates the lessons from Scripture most, because he’s always liked a good story, and usually ignores the sermon entirely in favor of forming his own thoughts on the appointed readings.

Thomas, he knows, is a bit more complicated. They’ve never really discussed it.

Well, there’s hours til tea, after all, and Thomas enjoys a good discussion nearly as much as a fuck—sometimes more than, depending on the situation. And since they’ve exhausted the one, for the moment, there’s no reason not to indulge the other.

“It seems to mean a lot to you,” James begins. “More, I think, than it does to me.”

“You started to ask me a question. That’s a statement.”

“I…”

“James, darling, you know I’m just about the last person you’d be able to offend with a question in good faith.”

“How can you reconcile what we do with what they say?”

“You mean, because the Church has strong things to say about men who fuck men?”

“And men who fuck other men’s wives, and women who fuck anyone they aren’t married to, and just—they’re very preoccupied about fucking in general.”

“Hardly seems healthy, doesn’t it?” There’s the shadow of a laugh toward the end of the question. “But that’s the Church. And the Church is the Church, but God is God. They may be related but they aren’t the same.”

“So you’re not concerned about God.”

“Regarding this? Not in the slightest.”

“How have you come up with such a different answer from the Church, then?”

Thomas laces the fingers of his right hand through James’s left and tilts his head back to rest against the headboard. His eyes drift closed. “For God’s sake, we’re Anglicans, aren’t we? Heirs of Richard Hooker, who gave that we understand God through Scripture, tradition, and reason. Tradition has little love for those who are as we are and do what we do—Christian tradition, at least—so out that goes, which leaves us with Scripture and reason. Precious few mentions of sodomy in the Scriptures—the sin of Sodom isn’t even its namesake, it’s arrogance and inhospitality.”

James bites his tongue to keep from making a comment about Thomas’ father that would be in poor taste yet would also be stunningly accurate.

“Christ mentions sodomy not once, and if as Christians we are most concerned with following his commandments as his devoted students, then it leads that it’s not a particularly high priority. I should likely be much more concerned about my wealth than about my choice of lovers, as he has quite a bit to say to rich young men. So much for Scripture, directly, which then leads us to reason: why would God offer me such love and then forbid it me?”

He says this last looking directly at James, as if waiting for him to offer a counterargument. James is sure there is one, is sure he’s heard it many times, and that’s why he spent his entire life trying to ignore the way his face heats near handsome men— _(The form of men is objectively pleasing, surely all men think this to some extent)_ —and refusing to examine how few women genuinely turned his head—(Miranda had been the first to make him feel as truly stupefied as any handsome messmate ever did.) James can’t think of a damn counterargument now, not with Thomas staring straight into his eyes like this.

“It all comes back to creation, after all,” says Thomas. “The poetry that underlies the foundation of the universe. God spake the world into existence, out of joy, I like to think, and everything he created he contemplated and passed divine judgement and the judgement was that it was good. The sea and the land and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea and men and women in the image of God and it’s _good_ , James, it is all so good. God has given me both you and Miranda, and anyone who understands it cannot possibly say anything other than ‘God saw that it was good.’”

The words hang in the air between them. James wonders if Thomas has been thinking about this, staring out into the dreary weather, if he’s voiced these thoughts aloud before, if he’s been waiting for someone to ask.

“I think,” says James, “the only people who understand might be we three and the Almighty.”

“No one else matters,” says Thomas, leaning forward to gives James a kiss so thorough that for any other man it would signal the end of the conversation. James is not sure he’s actually _seen_ Thomas properly end a conversation. It’s more that conversations get interrupted by dinner and correspondence and sex.

Even through the haze of lust that threatens to overtake him as Thomas’s tongue slides in and out of his mouth, James knows that Thomas is both correct is a cosmic sense and woefully incorrect in an earthly one. And today, he casts the thought away, tosses it out the window to slink away through the drizzle.

“The hymn we sang this morning,” Thomas says, kissing across James’ face. “The best verse is the second one—‘Thus whilst our thoughts grow audible in words, the body with the ravished soul accords, we hallow pleasure’—isn’t that a delicious phrase, ‘we hallow pleasure’? This is holy, my love. This is a sacrament.”

James can’t think of what to say to that, and so, man of action that he is, he opts for falling sideways across the bed and bringing Thomas down with him.

Some time after, after Thomas has knelt between his knees and swallowed him down with such a reverent face that James worries he’ll never been able to kneel at an altar rail again without blushing, after Thomas has buried his hands in James’s hair and moaned into James’s mouth, after they’re once again thoroughly spent and somewhat in awe of each other, James raises his head to look at Thomas and says:

“The creation story you mentioned is only the first one.” Thomas blinks. “I do pay attention to the lectionary, you know, I have a fairly firm grasp on the narrative, however many doctrinal questions I might have. There’s a second creation story. You’ve mentioned it to me.”

“Yes?”

“‘It is not good for man to be alone.’ Lovely sentiment, though it’s also the one where woman is created from the side of man.”

He can’t leave it alone. This is what they do, after all—they fuck, they talk, they fuck, they talk. It’s a miracle anyone manages to give a damn about Nassau anymore. But then, James sometimes thinks Thomas might be miraculous.

“I just imagine,” James continues, “that Miranda has some strong opinions on the subject.”

Thomas grins. “Oh, she absolutely does. We’ll ask her when we go downstairs.”

_1716_

It has been many years since either of them has darkened the door of a church. James isn’t entirely sure he won’t spontaneously combust if he tried. Thomas insists that’s shoddy theology, but they never test it.

James has never been the praying sort, but Thomas was. Thomas is. James wonders if it helped, in Bethlem, in Savannah. He never asks, but if it was, he’s grateful. He’s grateful for everything that kept them alive. It’s almost absurd, just how recently he was doing his best to die. Miranda had been right—the Miranda he saw in his dreams, Miranda who knew things he could not have known. Some people would call that a vision. James doesn’t call it anything, just knows now that Miranda was right, as she so often was in life.

There is still so much grief. Grief over Miranda, over the lost chance to make a new world. Grief for names Thomas is only now becoming familiar with—Madi, Hal, Silver.

Thomas doesn’t kneel by the bedside to pray. He does it, he says, while washing dishes, or banking the fire before bed. Putting the kettle on in the morning. Opening shutters. He’s private about it, entirely silent, except when he sings.

There are days, evenings, when James is attending to his own business—writing, reading, peeling a peach—and he hears, from another part of the house or from out in the orchard, Thomas humming Old Hundredth, or singing the words, _Praise God from whom all blessings flow_ , strangely comforting even to James, a man who has done little but rail at God for the past decade.

Thomas turns the key in the lock, opens the door, and there he is, on the threshold of his home with James. There is evening, and there is morning, and it is good.

**Author's Note:**

> I did an absurd amount of research for a ~2000 work fic because few things annoy me more than incorrect details about the C of E in historical fiction. The first hymn Thomas sings is "A Hymn on the Divine Use of Music", text by Nathaniel Ingelo, as found in John Playford's _Psalms and Hymns in Solemn Musick_. (Playford is most famous for his books of dance tunes, one of which, the absolute banger "The Parson's Farewell", features significantly in the Black Sails soundtrack.) The second hymn Thomas sings is the text often referred to in Anglicanism as the Doxology, written in 1674 by Thomas Ken, a C of E bishop. The tune is Old 100th, which dates to the Genevan Psalter of 1562. (Old 100th is still in wide use today with the Doxology text, and personally I find few things more satisfying than a large crowd of people absolutely ripping into it. Like "The Parson's Farewell", it is a banger.)
> 
> I owe the majority of my hymn research to Edna Parks' 1957 doctoral dissertation "English hymns and their tunes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries", available on Boston University's open access site.
> 
> Title from the full title of Playford's hymnal: _Psalms & Hymns in Solemn Musick of Four Parts On the Common Tunes to the Psalms in Metre: Used in Parish Churches. Also Six Hymns for One Voyce to the Organ. For God is King of all the Earth, Sing ye Praises with Understanding, Psal.47.7. _


End file.
